Back in 2009, WorldNetDaily ran a campaign of sending "pink slips" to all members of Congress threatening them by claiming that if they don't support WND's right-wing agenda, they would face unspecified consequences. WND charged its readers $29.95 for the privilege of sending those "pink slips." We calculated that this venture was quite profitable for WND.

WND must be needing the money, because it's running the campaign again. It touted the return in an article last month:

What happens when more than 9 million messages warning Congress to shape up or ship out?

The only time it ever happened was 2009. That’s when WND launched the “Send Congress a Pink Slip” campaign resulting in an avalanche of imminent firing notices that were carefully and successfully delivered to every member of Congress over a period of several months.

The warnings were delivered on pink paper – depleting all supplies of pink paper in North America. Piled on top of one another, they would tower above the tallest building in the Capitol, the Washington Monument – eventually even the tallest building in the world. Some members extolled the campaign against overspending and irresponsible behavior, while others whispered and murmured about it behind closed doors.

Ultimately the pink slip campaign presaged the tea party movement and one of the biggest voter revolts in American history in 2010.

And that’s why WND is bringing it back – updated, rejuvenated and refined – in 2014.

Needless to say, WND is overstating the impact of its campaign. Divide those 9 million "pink slips" WND claims to have sent (offering no documentation that this in fact happened) by the 535 members of Congress they were sent to, and you get approximately 16,822 people who sent WND $29.95. The more impressive number is that WND raked in more than $500,000 through this scheme, and you know it didn't cost anywhere near that much for WND to print and send those slips, especially since, according to the pictures accompanying the article, WND sent those slips out in large boxes and not individual envelopes.

WND goes on to inform us that it's charging the same this time around:

For just $29.95 you can send an individualized notice to every member of Congress in the form of a “pink slip.” It will bear your name and your address and be sent and delivered to every member of the House and Senate, giving them plenty to think about before the November election.

Are you ready for another revolution in 2014? Only you can make it happen.

Are you ready to make WND some easy money to take its mind off the fact that it has forefited all credibility? Only you can make it happen.

President Barack Obama treats the press like a spoiled child treats his parents. Despite the pampering, he just keeps complaining about them until he gets his way. As America tires of his inflated sense of self-importance while the economy limps and his foreign policy crumbles, Obama travels around the country complaining that the mean old media aren't complimentary enough.

[...]

He's trying to intimidate the press — especially those who are now elbowing their colleagues to hold him accountable for his growing list of fiascoes. How far the spoiled child has fallen.

Bozell and Graham seem upset that Obama's horning in on their territory. After all, intimidating the press and complaining that the mean old media aren't complimentary enough to their agenda is the raison d'etre for the Media Research Center.

A July 5 WorldNetDaily article by Jerome Corsi (Google cache) contains the following passage:

If that looks familiar, it's because Corsi copied it pretty much word-for-word from the Wikipedia entry for CinemaScore:

The current version of Corsi's article has removed the plagiarized passages and, for some reason, managed to misspell CinemaScore. The article does not inform readers that it has been altered to remove plagiarism.

Between this and the chart-reading fail, one has to wonder how Corsi could continue to write for WND. But Corsi has alwaysdonethis, and one realizes that, unlike with any other journalist, factual accuracy or journalistic integrity is not required to be a WND reporter.

Anticipating the mid-term 2014 elections in November, the Obama administration appears to be manipulating unemployment numbers to mask an economy about to slip back into recession.

The Bureau of Labor Force announcement that unemployment dropped from 6.3 percent in March to 6.1 percent in April was partly attributable to the more than 92 million Americans classified as out of the labor force, reducing the labor participation rate to 62.8 percent, a historic low dropout rate that has remained the same since April.

Adjusting the BLS unemployment number to report what is known as “U-6” – a measure that includes total unemployed, all persons marginally attached to the labor force and the total part-time employed for economic reasons – unemployment in April was 14.6 percent.

Actually, the person manipulating unemployment numbers is Corsi. Here's the BLS chart to which Corsi links to back up his claim -- the bottom row is the U-6 rate:

The 14.6 percent rate Corsi cites is, in fact, an unadjusted rate from June 2013. The adjusted U-6 rate for April -- we have no idea why he's writing about April if the most recent numbers are from June -- is 12.3 percent. And the rate for June is 12.1 percent.

Despite his massive factual error, Corsi goes on to quote some guy who makes up his own unemployment rates attacking the BLS numbers as "virtually 'meaningless.'"

Here's a screenshot of Corsi's false claim, in case he and WND try to change it without telling readers:

WorldNetDaily's highly questionable campaign to promote Todd Akin's new book by trying to defend his indefensible comments about "legitimate rape" took a completely expected partisan turn in a June 26 article, in which WND and Akin try to make hay off Hillary Clinton's long-ago defense of a man accused of sexually assaulting a child:

Hillary Clinton apparently didn’t like a challenge from Todd Akin that she “de-legitimized” a 12-year-old rape victim’s claim in defense of a perpetrator she knew to be guilty as charged, as reported in the London Daily Mail Wednesday.

So she fired back in a retort to Politico Thursday through her rapid-response team: “Nobody should take advice from Todd Akin on women’s rights following his opposition to equal pay laws, his opposition to choice and opposition to rape protection laws, and his belief that women’s bodies ‘shut down’ during ‘legitimate rape’ to block unwanted pregnancy,” said communications director Adrienne Elrod.

Akin, a member of the House from Missouri who was attacked for a comment about “legitimate rape” during a 2012 campaign for the U.S. Senate, quickly responded in kind.

“It is curious to see that the Clinton camp chose to assassinate my character rather than to address my basic charge,” he told WND. “It is not so much that Hillary Clinton defended a child rapist – lawyers are required sometimes to do those things. But how can Ms. Clinton say she is for women’s rights when she laughed her way through an interview about getting a man she knew to be guilty off the hook for raping a 12-year-old?”

[...]

The interview took place in 1980, and recordings were recently unearthed at the Clinton Library in Little Rock. She conceded in that recording to seizing on loopholes to minimize the sentence of the man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. Heard laughing in the recording, Clinton said the polygraph test her client managed to pass “forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.”

Akin tasked the media with making clear that “liberal Democrats like Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton are the true perpetrators of the ‘war on women.’” He added that by laughing while discussing the case, Clinton “de-legitimized the legitimate claims of the 12-year-old victim,” and that she “slandered the victim to justify her tactics.”

Akin seems to be unfamiliar with the American system of law in which defendants get a defense lawyer. It's absurd -- not to mention un-American -- for Akin to believe that a man does not deserve a legal defense because many people believe he's guilty. Clinton was assigned to the man's case and was required by law to provide the strongest defense she could.

Further, it's clear from the full context of her remarks that Clinton was laughing about the legal process, not getting a criminal off. Akin also provides no evidence that Clinton "slandered" the 12-year-old victim.

The WND article then descends into its usual boilerplate defense of Akin's "legitimate rape" remarks, suggesting that some rape claims are "an excuse to avoid an unwanted pregnancy" because "There have been women who have lied about being raped."

If Akin is automatically presuming that any rape claim is automatically false because some undetermined number of women have lied about it in the past, that's hardly a solid defense of his remarks.

The latest employment numbers were very good news, with 288,000 new jobs created and the unemployment rate falling to 6.1 percent. But what's good news for the economy under a Democratic president is bad news for CNSNews.com, so it had a mission: Bury that good news under a pile of cherry-picked numbers.

None of these articles mentioned the fact that 288,000 jobs were created in June.

Additionally, an article by Penny Starr quoted an officials with the right-wing group Generation Opportunity -- described by Starr only as "a Millinneal think tank" with no mention of its ideological slant -- claiming that “My generation needs more jobs." That article, too, failed to mention that 288,000 jobs were created in June.

Raging homophobe Les Kinsolving is at it again in his June 30 WorldNetDaily column, complaining about how Washington's National Cathedral welcomed a transgender minister:

This liturgical and homiletic innovation inevitably begs the question as to when the Episcopal Cathedral would invite as a guest preacher anyone who engages in another (but unmentioned by the LGBT community) sexual orientation: polygamy (as well as its alternative, polyandry: a woman who marries multiple husbands)?

And that is only the beginning for those who justify same-sex marriage. Along with polygamy and polyandry, when can we expect the National Cathedral to speak out in protest of the persecution and prosecution of pedophiles – especially older men who love to satisfy their sexual longings of teenagers or even younger than that?

It only "begs the question" in Kinsolving's fevered homophobic mind. And he's not done:

This would include coprophilia, incest, urophilia, exhibitionism and klismaphilia.

Rather than enumerating the additional and very bizarre alternative sexual orientations (of which there are a number), let us wait for the Washington Cathedral’s approval of NAMBLA – and if not, why not?

Where are these "reports" Kinsolving claims to have "seen"? He never tells us. If that's the best sourcing he can come up with, no wonder he sunk into the journalistic cesspool of WND to finish out his so-called reporting career -- and no wonder he's not allowed to do anything beyond impotently raging in a lightly read column.

A July 1 Media Research Center item by Geoffrey Dickens carries the headline "89 Percent of Network Stories Omit Obama's Role in Causing Border Crisis." Dickens apparently hasn't considered the fact that this is because Obama didn't.

Dickens asserts that "the President’s own failure to enforce immigration laws" is "a cause for thousands of immigrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexican border." But in the very next paragraph he backs off, writing that it is only a "possible cause." That suggests that even Dickens knows he's making a claim not supported by fact.

Dickens then claimed that Obama "extending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)" is allegedly one of "the ways the Obama administration has encouraged the flow of illegal immigrants." But DACA would not apply to any of the current refugees; to be eligible, an undocumented immigrant must have "continuously resided in the United States since June 15, 2007, up to the present time."Therefore, DACA cannot possibly be attracting these immigrants.

Curiously, Dickens is silent about the actual root cause of the current border crisis: drug violence in Central America. Even MRC subsidiary CNSNews.com has acknowledged that drug violence is to blame.

The only evidence Dickens provides to back up his attack on Obama is a generic link to MRC Latino's Facebook page and a link to an earlier MRC piece he wrote that simply quotes a Univision commentator blaming Obama (and also failing to mention the drug violence).

If you're ignoring basic, documented facts the way Dickens does, there's no way to take his "media research" seriously.

WND's Corsi Shills For D'Souza's New Film, Still Can't Get His Facts StraightTopic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily's Jerome Corsi does his best to shill for admitted criminal Dinesh D'Souza's new film in a June 30 article:

The political left is coming out “screaming,” with “guns blazing,” in an attempt to dampen the audience for the highly anticipated film “America: Imagine a World Without Her,” its maker told WND just before its Hollywood premiere.

This being the factuallychallengedCorsi, he's working from a flawed premise -- that anyone who doesn't like D'Souza's film must be on "the left." Corsi cites three outlets that gave a negative review to D'Souza's film -- the Daily Beast, IndieWire and The Wrap -- but never demonstrates that the reviewers are on "the left" other than his ipso-facto fallacy that because they didn't like the film, they must be liberal.

Corsi then sets up D'Souza to dismiss the reviews as coming from "the left," as if D'Souza is intellectually or emotionally capable of taking a negative review to heart, especially as his film is opening. But like Corsi, he doesn't offer any evidence to back up his assertion about the reviewers' pruported political motivation.

Of course, Corsi is doing nothing more than serving as a PR agent for D'Souza. It's not journalism, but then, has Corsi ever acted like a journalist?

Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet is back for more fearmongering about filthy immigrants in a June 30 WorldNetDaily column:

Border Patrol agents have long been at risk for violence from drug cartels and criminals. Just last week Tucson sector agents were fired upon by Mexican aircraft inside the U.S. border. But now there is a new, insidious threat to Border Patrol agents, families and communities from the crush of illegal immigrants at our southern border, which has become a gateway for disease entry.

Border agents have tested positive for tuberculosis (TB), H1N1 (“swine”) flu and chicken pox. Other diseases like dengue and Ebola virus also may be in this wave of illegals, since people are coming from Central and South America, the Middle East and West Africa. Dengue fever, including the hemorrhagic form, is already raging in Puerto Vallerta, Mexico. Ebola virus hemorrhagic fever is seriously out of control in several West African countries.

These diseases are highly contagious, especially in crowded and poor sanitary conditions in the detention and processing centers where thousands of illegals are housed until sent to other areas of America, without full screening for such diseases.

The extent of the threat appears to be unknown, or is being kept secret. We do know that the federal government advertised in January for “escorts” for up to 65,000 unaccompanied minors, indicating this flood of illegals was orchestrated.

First: Ebola? Really? Sounds a lot like Madeleine Cosman, who wrote an article for the so-called medical journal of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons -- for whom Vliet has served as a director -- falsely claiming that immigrants were increasing the number of leprosy cases in the U.S.

Oh, and Ebola is pretty much confined to Africa, so it's extremely unlikely that it will come to the U.S. by the southern border.

Further, some of those diseases Vliet listed can be vaccinated against, but as we've noted, the AAPS for which Vliet served as a director opposes mandatory vaccinations despite their life-saving nature.

While Vliet claims to support vaccinations, she might want to have a chat with her AAPS colleagues about that, as well as all the fearmongering about filthy immigrants.

On NPR’s Morning Edition, anchor Steve Inskeep announced “It's Friday morning, which is when we hear from StoryCorps, which is marking the anniversary of a pivotal moment for gay rights -- the 1969 Stonewall riots – 45 years ago tomorrow, gay protesters clashed with police in New York. Now StoryCorps is launching an initiative to preserve the stories of LGBT people, which is called OutLoud.”

Inskeep turned to the testimony of a seventy-year old homosexual named Patrick Haggerty, who told a story about how he went to high school in rural Washington state with glitter on his face, and his father came to school in dirty farmer clothes. The father was hailed by the son: “I had the patron saint of dads for sissies.”

[...]

Inskeep came back to announce: “The interview is recorded in Seattle for OutLoud. That's StoryCorps initiative to collect LGBT stories. It will be archived at the Library of Congress and you can hear more about Stonewall on the podcast. Get it on iTunes and at npr.org.”

The whole "OutLoud" LGBT-celebrating enterprise is taxpayer-funded through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Graham is just as outraged that taxpayer money may have been used to talk to gay people as he is at NPR broadcasting it. Of course, Graham won't look at it as offsetting the tax-free money Graham and the MRC use to demonize gays.

NEW ARTICLE: Doctor, Heal ThyselfTopic: WorldNetDaily
With all the lies and fearmongering she spreads WorldNetDaily columnist Dr. Gina Loudon appears to be in need of the psychiatric help she purports to dispense. Read more >>

A June 27 Newsmax article by Todd Beamon touts how the IRS was ordered to pay $50,000 in damages to anti-gay group National Organization for Marriage for having "illegally exposed" the group's donor list. Beamon goes on to uncritically quote right-wing activist Tony Perkins claiming that the IRS "deliberately" released the information to a "gay activist."

But Perkins is lying. The investigation into the leak found that the IRS' release of NOM donor information was not deliberate. The release was the inadvertent mistake of a low-level employee, which even NOM chief Maggie Gallagher has conceded.

It's not until the 17th paragraph of his 19-paragraph article that Beamon gets around to mentioning the fact that the IRS release was inadvertent.

Still, Beamon tried to keep the nonexistent conspiracy going, highlighting that the head of the group to which NOM's information was leaked left "to work on President Barack Obama's re-election campaign as national co-chairman."

Even when WorldNetDaily is defending someone, it has trouble getting its facts straight.

Leo Hohmann uses a June 23 WND article to paint columnist Gedorge Will as a victim of the "though police" for writing about sexual assault on college campuses:

In his column, Will said he didn’t trust the government’s statistics that “1 in 5″ college women get raped, nor did he trust that all of the reported assaults were in fact rapes because of the heavy drinking and the “ambiguities of the hookup culture” on display nightly at many campuses.

Will said universities, under pressure from the U.S. Department of Education, often deny young men accused of rape the basic due process found in the regular court system. He also implied that being a college rape victim was becoming a “coveted status that confers privileges.”

One major newspaper, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, reacted by pulling Will’s column from its editorial page and replacing it with that of former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, who is from St. Louis and more in line with the newspaper’s ideas of what a conservative should be.

Hohmann gets an important thing wrong. The government has never claimed that 1 in 5 college women "get raped"; it claimed that they experience a sexual assault, which covers not only rape but attempted sexual assault and forced sexual contact.

Hohmann also downplays Will's claim that being a victim on a college campus was becoming a "coveted status" by claiming he merely "implied" it. Actually, Will's statement was made in a very straightforward manner.

An unbylined June 29 article tried to up the ante, copying-and-pasting Hohmann's error that the government claims that 1 in 5 college women "get raped," then segues into promotion for Todd Akin's upcoming WND-published book and another failed attempt to insist that Akin was right to claim that women routinely lie about being raped and that even if they do suffer a "legitimate rape," they have a biological mechanism to "shut that whole thing down." WND continues to pretend that long-term stress that inhibits fertilitity is the same thing as the sudden trauma of being rape.

Perhaps portraying women as inveterate liars about sexual assault isn't the most effective way to promote a book or defend a columnist.